


and i'll watch the skies fall out

by kathedrel



Category: Jojo Rabbit (2019)
Genre: Curtain Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:01:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23561200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathedrel/pseuds/kathedrel
Summary: He grows up, and he gets a pet rabbit.
Relationships: Jojo Betzler & Elsa Korr
Comments: 2
Kudos: 44





	and i'll watch the skies fall out

The Americans come to town and don’t leave. Every man over the age of twenty that Jojo once knew dies. He hears the shots at night; _bang, bang, bang,_ and he cries into his blanket. Elsa walks in on him once, and wraps her arms around him, even though her shoulders are stiff with disagreement. 

*

He sits by while one of the Americans stamps on a swastika flag and burns it with a cigarette lighter. He’s laughing the whole time, and Jojo can’t understand a word he’s saying but his mouth has a mean curve to it. 

Jojo shuffles his feet and stares down at the ground. His stomach feels like someone’s tried to mix vinegar and baking soda. 

It’s his country. He loves it. It’s an immutable fact; Germany is great, has been and always will be. 

But he doesn’t feel bad when he watches the flag go up in flames. His country made mistakes. Lots of them. 

(He thinks of his mother’s shoelaces, dangling and untied.) 

*

He bleaches the walls of his room, strips down every bit of plaster that might’ve once held a swastika or an SS flag. Elsa helps, humming.

“What are you singing?” He lets go of his brush for a second, turning to look at her. 

She just smiles, in that sweet, taunting way that he loves but also really hates. 

“You wouldn’t know,” She says, and rips off the last corner of an old red poster, dropping it in the garbage bin. 

*

He goes upstairs (not his mother’s room, never his mother's room), and flips through their records until he finds something that doesn’t look _too_ scratched up to put on the turntable. He touches the needle to the record, leans his ear in, and listens to the first one, Bach, and then the next, Beethoven.

He goes upstairs every night before he falls asleep, drowsily humming along to familiar tunes, and peering curiously at the records of the new ones. 

_Mendelssohn_ , he thinks when he finally finds it. 

He likes the sound. 

*

His mother’s dead, and he still doesn’t realise it sometimes. He’ll turn around, expecting her to be in the kitchen, or catch himself listening for the sound of her shoes tapping out some ancient beat. By some silent agreement, he and Elsa have left her room entirely untouched. He goes once, and only once, and this is what he does; he kneels on the floor and blinks, his eyes going damp, and then he takes a family picture - the only one they have - and clutches it to his chest with a sob. 

He leaves, and his footsteps echo. 

He closes the door. He doesn’t have time for ghosts. Not now. 

*

He watches as things get torn apart. He watches as they get put back up, people slowly unbending their spines and rebuilding the city. They don’t look happy, but they look happi _er_ , and he supposes that’s a start. 

Jojo was three when the war started. He wonders how the world was before then. Did people sing in the street, like they do now? Or is that just a new development? 

Elsa tells him that yes, they’ve always done that. When people stop singing is when you should worry. 

Jojo starts humming Mendelssohn. 

*

He heads out to the fields with Yorki one day, near the woods where they’d spent their first weekend in the Hitler Youth. They’re sitting on a log, carving sticks into funny faces, when Jojo sees it. 

“Look, Yorki! A rabbit!” It’s snow-white, standing out against the woodchip-and-leaf-debris ground. It nibbles at the stem of a plant. If it had a face, Jojo thinks it would be smiling. 

“Looks cool. You think we should catch it?” Yorki says, tilting his head. 

Jojo looks at it, thinking of wires and traps and netting and lettuce. 

He grins. 

“I think we should keep it.” 

*

He brings back the rabbit. Elsa laughs, calls him ridiculous, and smiles. He frowns, and but in the end, he can’t keep himself from laughing either. 

Ghosts dance around the house, out on the streets, but there’s a bunny in his lap and Elsa smiling at him and somewhere in the background, there’s music. 

He has the strangest feeling that everything will be alright. 


End file.
